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That's actually a great point. And one could argue that since Valve doesn't require exclusive distribution, some companies might release games in paralell for both Steam and retail Steam-less box sets for Linux. Which would be a great thing.

Already happening. Better yet: there are games out there that you can buy in form of retail discs for which you can enter the CD key in Steam and have both for the price of one. This has already been said many times before

But then again I could just as easily be wrong. Perhaps developers could look at a Steam victory on Linux and decide the platform is viable, but decide to release their software without DRM. That would really be something to celebrate.

Getting the gamers over to Linux will highly likely result in many more, and good, free software games instead of the mods that are made today Also the quality of FLOSS drivers will probably improve. Canonical can simpley decide that the noveau driver is good enough, stop shipping older X servers and proprietary nVidia drivers via a wizzard and have nVidia pressured to have a FLOSS driver. With rapid changes like Gallium3D state trackers (and releyence? Did somebody say a Ray Tracing state tracker? *ducks and runs*) and maybe Wayland nVidia will have to make sure their products do well in the Linux world.

The one thing that does worry me is the catch-22: if people like me boycott Steam on Linux, we'll help stop DRM from spreading. But at the same time, if Steam fails miserably on Linux, it could cause other developers to start thinking that Linux isn't worth developing for. So in that sense, it's a no-win...

It is al about getting gamers from a proprietary DRM ridden Windows over to Linux. If you want to make an omulet you've got to break an egg...

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Don't like it, don't use it simple as that. What is more important is that you do have a choice vs no choice at all.

Exactly, the point is it will help to make Linux a more popular platform by offering more choice. Is that going to destroy open source projects? On the contrary, it will bring more interest to open source projects by exposing more users to open source. Users will be using an OS which is 99% open source now instead of 1%. The popularity of Linux going up is only a good thing.

Ok so Phoronix linked back to its own article... Still Michael claims to have a resource, the binary is up for download and it is being worked on. Valve has been using Wine hacks before Crossover came to the Mac...

That's not Michaels fsck up and a Linux binary is comming.

So it will come.

It probably will it seems, but there are also politics and many other things to worry about, so you cannot say that it will for certain come, and you are not an official Valve source.

I hope not. Autopackage is crap. Unneeded, superfluos crap. A solution without a problem.

There's very much a problem, which is that there still currently is no cross-distro system in use for tying into a cross-distro add/remove programs interface standard. No standards are a big problem. The only standards right now which apply to this situation to some degree are the POSIX standards for running binaries and the freedesktop.org standards.

Please explain to me why you feel that users should be happy with no desktop integration whatsoever with straight-up compressed archives with binaries in, or with a fragmentation of packaging systems which don't have a common format standard which is compatible with them all as it should be?

Standards = freedom. Linux needs more freedom. Everyone parties about pushing other standards, but when it comes to standards for being able to easily share installable programs which integrate and are easy to use, i.e. not distro or distro version dependent, the solution is to go eff yourself? Great progress.

Yes, Autopackage or other real cross-distro standards should be used for Steam and for all programs which developers feel should reach all Linux users.

Or do you only care about Ubuntu and Debian users, and everyone else is irrelevant?

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Meh, simple .sh install script would be enough. And Valve likes simple. as it is more simple to create and troubleshoot. Plus, it can be run anywhere.

Yes, but how is a user supposed to then remove the program easily? Without a standardized tie-in with the package/program management system, somehow, that will never be easy, and I don't want to see two icons, one for running and one for removing, either, as that would just be cluttered and lame.

Linux needs proper standards in this department to get developers from point A to Z easily for all distros. Linux needs to cater better to developers and thus users in their ability to easily get the software they want.

Don't even get me started on the freedom to upgrade to newer versions of programs easily due to them not being in the repositories, like the simple job of upgrading from Firefox 3 to Firefox 3.5, or from 3.5 to 3.6, lol, you either unpack and click on the binary from a compressed archive, and manually make the menu links, or you have to wait for the next distro update which is currently in beta. That of course is one reason some Linux users choose rolling releases like apparently Arch and others like Gentoo are, but I would like both choice, ease of use, and stability, yeah, all three, I'm a greedy one. Would be very easy to do though if there was this thing called packaging standards.